ENTREPRENEURS OF DOOM: Auto Racing as Morality

 

I have always thought auto racing was like capitalism - a chaotic rush for victory at any costs, lives risked to feed a hunger to win. Consider events that began 120 miles southwest of Paris, on Saturday, 11 June, 1955. The 24 hours of Le Mans had been running for just two hours when Pierre Levegh, driving the number 20 Mercedes-Benz 300, “The greatest sports racing car ever built”, was clipped from behind by an Austin Healey, and then catapulted into the air at 150 miles an hour by a 3 foot embankment meant to keep the cars on the track.

The 1,900 pound aluminum and magnesium car then went flipping nose over tail down the embankment, and the dynamic physics ripped the engine from its mounts, shredded the fuel tank, spewing the crowd in gasoline and benzine. The wheels and axles, radiator and doors were ripped off the frame. Every loose piece of metal, every screw and bolt, fender and nut was instantly converted into a spinning scythe, killing outright and decapitating 120 spectators and maiming another 300. 

And leaving Pierre Levegh laying half naked, dead on the race course (above). Rescue crews than made matters worse by pouring water on the burning magnesium, intensifying the flames. The horrific death toll caused France, Spain, Switzerland and Germany to ban all auto racing for a time. And in the United States, the American Auto Club, which had regulated professional auto racing, decided to break all contact with the blood sport.

The only man who could save auto racing in America was Anton “Tony” Hulman (above), a Yale Business School graduate, and heir to a Terre Haute dry goods fortune. 

In November 1945 Huleman had paid $750,000 for the dilapidated almost abandoned 320 acre Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS)(above).  Recalled Clarence Cagle, long time Hulman Company employee, “We unlocked the gate, and it fell down. Everything was rotten, there were weeds everywhere. It was a terrible mess.” Hulman rebuilt the grandstands and staged the first post war race on Memorial Day, 1946. The next year Hulman broke a driver's strike and made the Indianapolis 500, the only auto race most Americans ever saw or heard of.

A decade later Huleman dealt with the loss of the Automobile Club sponsorship just as decisively. He formed a new regulating body, hiring technicians and inspectors, copy writers to coordinate advertising and raising purses for dozens of small private tracks and hundreds of midget and sprint car open wheel races across the country. 

Huleman called his new sanctioning body “The United States Auto Club”.  He financially backed races at dozens of quarter and half mile oval dirt tracks across the Midwest and West, many  originally built for harness racing.  Every summer and fall USAC supported this “minor league” for auto racing, where younger fans could first encounter the sport, and test their talents as sponsors, mechanics, drivers and team owners. 

The vast majority of these USAC events “were not well attended”, but because the 500 was a national event, these tracks survived during the Huleman era. This was the business model for American open wheel, or Indy car,  racing for almost forty years.

Because of it's small dirt track origins Indy cars remained tied to front engine roadsters through the 1950's,. But beginning in the 1960's smaller rear engine designs and drivers from European asphalt and concrete road courses came to dominate the Indy 500. 

 American auto racing became a business model divided against itself. The European teams were not interested in supporting the USAC feeder system. And as Tony Huleman aged, so did USAC. Like any bureaucracy, inertia came to dominate. This was understandable as racing was expensive, and innovation only made it more so. What tied  Indy car racing to its fans through the 1970's was the experience and inertia of Tony Huleman and USAC.  Then in 1977, Tony Huleman died at the age of 76, and the following year, eight key managers and technicians for USAC were killed when their plane went down in an Indiana spring thunderstorm.

It was now that a new generation of entrepreneurs sought to remake American racing, led by the son of an Ohio corporate executive, Roger Penske (above). As a team owner he first competed at Indianapolis in 1968,  winning his first 500 in 1972, with driver Mark Donahue. 

And in 1978 Penske read the “White Letter” written by Formula 1 and USAC driver and All American Racing team owner Dan Gurney (above). Gurney wrote, “We as businessmen should be ashamed of ourselves for being involved in a prestigious sport...as weak and disorganized as it presently is”.  Gurney called for the owners to organize, as then, “USAC will work for us and support our cause and our policies.... Let's call it...Championship Auto Racing Teams.” Gurney closed by identifying CART's primary obstacle. “It appears that a 'show down' with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is or should be the first target. They are the ones who can afford it...”.

Penske liked what he read, and in 1978, he was bankrolled by an accountant turned oil wildcatter turned USAC team owner and entrepreneur, Ueal Eugene “Pat” Patrick (above)...

Together these three - Gurney, Penske and Patrick -  formed Championship Auto Racing Teams, governed by a CEO and a board of 8 owners, one driver and one mechanic, dividing between them 24 voting shares, with president Patrick and Penske and a few others receiving additional controlling votes. In March of 1979, CART launched their own league with an oval race at Phoenix, Arizona.

USAC and Joe Cloutier, Tony Huleman's right hand man and chosen replacement, struck back one month later, informing the CART teams that because their actions were “harmful to racing",  they would not be allowed to compete in the 1979 Indy 500.  On the track's opening day - 5 May, 1979 -  a federal court granted CART an injunction, forcing USAC to admit their entries.

CART, now led by Penske lawyer John Frasco, had won. USAC continued to support dirt tracks, but under the new CART points system, winning the Indy 500 was worth no more than winning the Ontario, California 500. The vaunted Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and it's USAC creation, had been brought to its knees.

But during the 1980's cracks appeared in CART's veneer. The governing board backed rules which consistently favored the teams of Penske and Patrick, who could afford innovations like new engines and “ground effects” body designs, while blocking carbon-fiber bodies until Penske designers could develop their own. The board was reconfigured, and almost immediately reconfigured again. Most of the teams, lured by the promise of a more responsive management and bigger purses, instead saw Penske drivers win most of the races and almost every seasonal championship. Also , despite CART's promise to cut costs,  fielding a CART racer was now topping $10 million year, leaving most owners condemned to poverty row and losing seasons

Then in 1989 head of USAC Joe Clouter died, and was succeeded by 31 year old Tony George, grandson of Tony Huleman.  That same year, the CART board voted to fire John Frasco, and replace him with John Caponigro, who promised the old dream of bigger purses and smaller costs. He tried squeezing more money out of of league sponsor PPG.  When PPG complained, the CART board fired Caponigro, and over the next six years CART went through three bosses. None could keep the owners satisfied for long, as attendance and television ratings declined for both CART and Tony George's new competing Indy Racing League, which was fielding cheaper and slower/safer cars.

In March of 1998 CART went public, offering 4,500,000 shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Originally offered at $16 per share the price quickly rose to $35.63 per share. The offering also allowed the entrepreneurs (Penske, Patrick , et al) to convert their 22 voting shares into 400,000 shares of common stock, worth about $100 million. A year later these same men sold most of their stock for less than $25.00 a share, before abandoning CART for the IRL. It smelled of a classic “pump and dump” Wall Street fraud. Except in the new era of "unregulated capitalism", it was just business as usual.

As Gordon Kirby, editor of “Motor Sport” magazine, put it, “Sadly, the influx of money served only to exacerbate the self-interest, egos and greed which had always been at the heart of CART's problems, and in the end most of the team owners wound up selling their shares at a handsome profit and jumping ship. It was an abysmal display of everything the organization theoretically had been founded to prevent. “

In 2004, Roger Penske admitted only, “We've probably lost some of the media, we've lost some of the fans, and we've lost some of the sponsors. Obviously, there's been some damage...” John Menard, another of the original CART entrepreneurs, was a little more honest. “CART has zero market share” he admitted in 2004, “and the IRL has a bit more, but when you combine the two...it kind of doesn't matter.”  As usual, Robin Miller, the opinionated gadfly who covered most of the racing civil war for the Indianapolis Star, was more direct. “The people who used to watch Indy-car racing either got pissed off and quit watching (or) quit going”

Most of the economic damage was out side of the Indianapolis Speedway. Writer Bob Zeller could tell “Car and Driver” magazine, “...more spectators attended the 29th running of the Long Beach Grand Prix than watched it on television” The paid attendance in 2004 was 95,000, while only 60,000 homes tuned in to watch the race.  But even the Indianapolis 500, the goose that each year laid a golden egg for open wheel racing, dropped from a 13 Nielson share in 1979, to a 3.8 share in 2014. There were still half a million people at the Speedway on race day, but the television audience was under 6 million  CART had decimated open wheel racing in America, from top to bottom,, CART had proved to be a preview of the 2007 Wall Street disaster of greed and shortsighted selfishness.

By 2007, with the CART stock price below $0.25 a share, CART declared bankruptcy, and disappeared, leaving behind a few wealthy entrepreneurs who had grown even more wealthy, thousands of stock holders who had lost from a few hundred to a few thousands of dollars, millions of fans with a foul taste in their mouths, and American open wheel racing all but dead on the track. Mike Tanier, racing author, has compared American open wheel racing after CART to “ a once-divorced couple (that) survives amidst the wreckage of a pair of shattered lives...It lurches from race to race and season to season, donning its Sunday best for Memorial Day weekend but grimly battling through most of the year.” Just another example of the dubious benefits of amoral capitalism, and the cost of supporting the lifestyles of the rich and greedy who suck the life out of everything they touch.

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JAY GOULD, Libertarian Hero

 

I wish modern libertarians could meet Jay Gould. Because Jay Gould was unfettered capitalism in the flesh, “the human incarnation of avarice,” as one minister described him, the Mephistopheles of Wall Street, the robber baron par excellence, “prince of the railroad schemers”, and the man within whom all the theories of the libertarians about capitalism and freedom met the reality of human nature, and got the living tar beat out of it.

He (above) was a “…short, thin man with cold black eyes, a narrow face and, in his maturity, a “full black beard”. Born into poverty, his mother was active in the Methodist Church until her death, when Jay was 10 years old. When he was seventeen, Jay apprenticed himself to surveyor, Mr. Oliver Diston, at the salary of $10 a month. When Jay started issuing his own maps for sale, Diston sued his apprentice. Jay’s attorney, Mr T. R. Westbrook,  managed to have the lawsuit dismissed. But, as one biographer noted, from that day forward, “…there was scarcely a day during his whole life that (Jay Gould) did not have some litigation on his hands.”

His map business made Jay $5, 000, which he invested with Zadock Pratt, a Manhattan leather merchant. Smothering Mr. Pratt in adoration, the 21 year old Jay proposed to write the older man’s biography. That project drew the pair into a partnership in a new leather tannery south of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Using Pratt’s money, Jay built an entire company town, which he named “Gouldborough”. He wrote Pratt sycophantic letters, in one describing the organizing meeting for the new community. “Three hearty cheers were proposed for the Hon(erable) Zadock Pratt…This is certainly a memorandum worthy of note in your biography, of the gratitude and esteem which Americans hold your enterprising history.”  However Mr. Pratt, who knew a lot more about the tanning business than did the young Jay Gould, had begun to see through the fog of compliments.

Pratt (above) showed up at the plant unannounced in the summer of 1858, to go over the books.  He quickly discovered them to be a confusing mess, showing unauthorized risky investments, including in a private bank which Jay had established in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.  But the company did not share in the bank's profits. Those went only to Jay Gould. Pratt decided to fire his erstwhile friend and sue him to take ownership of the bank.  However, Jay had anticipated this, and had already lined up a richer and more docile partner.  In August, when confronted by Pratt, Gould stunned the man by offering to buy him out for $60,000.  Pratt quickly accepted.  The cash for the buyout had come from Jay’s new partner, Charles Lessup.

But it wasn’t long before even the somnolent Lessup began to suspect he was being had. By the fall of 1859 Lessup was panicked by the commitments Jay Gould (above) had made, using his good name. But it was too late.  On 6 October, 1859, facing financial disaster, Charles Lessup shot himself.  Lessup’s daughters bitterly demanded Jay repay them for their father’s lost investment, and Jay countered with an offer of a payment of $10,000 a year for six years.  He had, of course, neglected to include any interest during the five year delay.  Unfortunately for Jay, the Lessup families’ lawyers caught the omission. And in the early months of 1860, they identified huge assets that Jay was hiding from Lessup's family.

Lawyers and 40 deputized men were dispatched to the tannery on Tuesday morning, 13 March, 1860. They flashed the legal papers, ushered the workers out and padlocked the doors. They held the place for a little over six hours, until Jay returned from New York.  Just past noon some 200 men stormed the building with axes, muskets and rifles.  Four men were shot, others were badly beaten, and according to the New York Herald, “…those who did not escape were violently flung from the windows and doors…”  As Jay Gould would later boast, “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”  The courts would eventually throw Jay Gould out of the tannery, but by then he had shifted his operations to a place more suited to his nature; the unregulated economic free-for-all that was Wall Street.

While North and South battled over slavery, Jay Gould battled over wealth. He formed his own brokerage firm -  Smith, Gould and Martin.  Like all of Gould's  partners, Smith and Martin  were soon left behind, broken and broke.  Gould  then made the acquaintance of James “Big Jim” Fisk, who made a fortune smuggling southern cotton through the Federal armies, and selling Confederate War Bonds. And even while brave men died in their tens of thousands,  Gould and Fisk joined with Daniel Drew, director of the Erie Railroad, in their own, private war.

Their enemy was Cornelius Vanderbilt (above), who owned every railroad in the east except the Erie. Naturally, “The Commodore”, as Vanderbilt liked to be called, was seeking a monopoly, so he could charge whatever he wanted for freight shipments, and he began to buy stock in the Erie. Sensing blood in the water, Jay and friends printed up 100,000 new shares of Erie stock, which The Commodore promptly bought, and which the board of the Erie – Drew, Fisk and Jay Gould – immediately declared to be worthless.

Bilked out of $7 million, Vanderbilt filed legal papers to examine the Erie’s books.  Jay and friends grabbed the company records and retreated to New Jersey, where they re-incorporated.  Vanderbilt then had arrest warrants issued for all three men, but since New York law could not touch them in New Jersey, the Commodore began to assemble ships and men to invade that state,  all by himself. While the Erie Board prepared to receive the invaders, Jay managed to slide a bill through the New York State assembly making the issuing of worthless stock, perfectly legal...retroactively, of course.

This trick was managed by the simple expedient of giving William “Boss” Tweed (above), the head of political graft in New York, a seat on the Erie board with stock and a healthy salary.  That brought the Erie War to a temporary pause.  And if you are feeling sorry for the Commodore, remember that Cornelius himself once said, “Law, what do I care about the law? Ain't I got the power?" -  another libertarian hero.  The entire bunch were so busy cheating and stealing they barely noticed the end of the Civil War.

With the Commodore’s cash, and further fortified by looting the Erie’s assets, Jay, Fisk and Drew began their own complicated scheme to raise freight rates on the Erie Railroad. Using the profits from that scheme, in 1869 they began to buy and hoard gold, because raising the price of gold would raise the price of wheat, which would allow them to raise the freight rates they charged farmers for shipping the wheat.  As insurance the trio took on another partner, Abel R. Corbin, who happened to be President Grant’s brother-in law.  The new partner gave the appearance that “the fix” was in, and other investors jumped on the bandwagon. The price of gold skyrocketed.

When President Grant learned about the manipulations, he immediately ordered the U.S. Treasury to sell $4 million in gold. On 24 September, 1869, that sudden influx hit the market like a bomb, and gold dropped 30% in a day.  The date would henceforth be known as “Black Friday” - at least until October of 1929. Thousands of investors were wiped out, including Abel Corbin. An angry mob swarmed the Gould’s brokerage offices, smashing the furnishings and chanting “Who killed Charles Lessup?” Of course the trio of Gould, Fisk and Drew, walked away from the wreckage with an $11 million profit.

Gould's own partner Daniel Drew was to be his next victim.  In 1870 Fisk and Gould sold their shares in the Erie to their one time enemy the Commodore, for $5 million. The deal gave Vanderbilt his monopoly, but it also revealed that the Erie was bankrupt.  And it left Daniel Drew, abandoned by his partners, out $1.5 million. He would die flat broke nine years later, just one more partner and one more victim of Jay Gould.

Big Jim Fisk was saved from a similar fate when, in 1871, a competitor for a woman shot him to death in a New York Hotel. After that Jay was reduced to stealing from lesser partners, such as Major Abin A. Selover, who actually considered himself a friend of Gould’s.  It was Selover who introduced Jay to a California friend of his, James R. Keene.  After Keene and Selover had both been battered by Gould in a contest for control of the telegraph company, Western Union,  Jay and Selover happened to meet on the street one day. Jay tried to walk past, but for once in his life, Jay Gould had been caught out in the open.

Selover grabbed Jay be the collar and shouted, “I’ll teach you to tell me lies!” The six foot tall Selover then threw Jay to the ground, and then yanked him up again by one hand, dangling him above the stairwell of a below-street level barbershop. With his free arm Selover began slapping the Mephistopheles of Wall Street and shouting, “Gould, you are a damn liar!” Nobody who witnessed the event interrupted to disagree. When Selover finally let go, Gould dropped 8 feet to the stairs. A stock broker the next day quipped, “It was characteristic of Mr. Gould that he landed on his feet.”

Overnight, Abin Selover became the most popular man in New York City. Jay Gould was smart enough not to press charges, since no jury could be expected to convict anyone of assaulting Jay Gould. Henceforth, Jay never went out without a body guard. He began to describe himself as the “most hated man in New York”, but there was a touch of pride in his voice when he said it. Selover eventually went broke, as did Keene. However, when he finally died in 1892, Jay Gould was the ninth richest man in America, worth about $77 million. He died a hero only to those who never did business with him. Gould scoffed at the idea that Wall Street should be regulated. “People will deal in chance….Would you not, if you stopped it, promote gambling?”

It was and is a philosophy which fails to see an advantage to drawing a line between gambling and investing. It is the philosophy of libertarianism. It is the philosophy of unmitigated greed. It was the philosophy of Jay Gould.  And people had lots of reasons to hate him. Not a very healthy hero.

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R U OK? I'm Okay

 

I think it would be okay to say the whole thing started when they expanded the criminal code of Boston to include, "No person, unless duly licensed by the mayor and aldermen, shall ring, or cause to be rung, any bell, or other instrument, in any street, to give notice of the exercise of any business or calling...under a penalty of not less than three nor more than twenty dollars for each offense.” This bureaucratic banality inspired the formation, on 26 October, 1838, of the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society, or in abbreviated form, the ABRS.

It was a joke, of course, an inside multi-layered joke - a joke about a joke about a joke. In this case the first joke, to the jesters,  was the anti-bell ringing law itself. And the second joke was in the group's name. It wasn't an anti-bell ringing society, it was a pro-bell ringing society; sort of the way “Working Class Americans for Fair Taxes" aren't any of those things either. And the third joke was that there wasn't anybody actually in the anti-bell ringing society.

See, during the 1830's there were 43 newspapers in the city of Boston, and, as you can imagine, the competition was rather severe.  At first each of their publishers had an axe to grind, from conspiracy theories ( the Anti-Masonic Christian Herald) to benevolent rich people (the National Philanthropist), or they carved out special interest niches (i.e., the New England Farmer). 

But the capitalist imperative eventually drove all the successful newspapers to copy each other, just as cable television did in the 1990's. A by-product of this leveling process was an intellectual rebellion by those who consumed the papers but needed to convince their fellow readers that they were smarter than the average yokels who read this drivel. Karl Marx referred to this as the "Club Effect", when he said, "I have a mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it." Or was that Groucho Marx?  Anyway...

At the time in Boston, there were also many inside-joke clubs, like the Association of Presidents of Bankrupt Insurance Companies, or the Mammoth Cod Association, or the Flouring Committee. Most of these existed merely to post newspaper announcements for non-existent meetings for these non-existent clubs.  Some of them, like the Anti-Bell Ringing Society went so far as to announce platitudinous field trips, which nobody actually showed up for because there was actually no body in the clubs. Everybody who got the joke was supposed to read these announcements and just laugh, not pack their bags.

In November of 1838 the ABRS went so far as to file suit in court to overturn the anti-bell ringing ordinance. And although they never paid the filing fee (and their case was never on the docket) the founders, whoever they or he was, kept the joke going by arguing with their non-existent critics that they had as much right to gather together as "any other moral and benevolent societies in existence". 

Did I mention their critics were also non-existent?  According to the stream of press releases, issued by the Lord High Chancellor of the ABRS - who did not exist -  the group had elected a "Professor of Bell-ecution", and a “Benign Reliever of the Bell-y-ache”.   And at their first mythical anniversary dinner  they  had mythologicaly toasted the ladies as, “the only belles the members of this society will ever ring to.”   In mid-March of 1839 they even took a mythical train trip to New York City. Does the term "ad nauseam" ring a bell?

Like future “You Tube-ers” the newspaper columnists launched their own abbreviated inside-jokes, abbreviated because they relied on initialism, also known as acronyms. In this alternative inside joke universe the initials N.C. substituted for 'nuff said, “GTT for gone to Texas, S.P., for small potatoes, 

and PDQ  for pretty damn quick - that one survived.  Ah, LOL et al. for the initiated. All others must pay cash.

On 23 March, 1839 the Boston Morning Post (one of the participating newspapers)  carried a follow-up story on page two, concerning that mythical field trip the ABRS did not take to New York City. The editor of the Providence, Rhode Island "Mercury" newspaper had  noticed that on the day announced, nobody from the ABRS had been on the Boston to New York City train, and noted so in his newspaper. The Boston sophisticates were in stitches. 

Clearly the poor philistine from Providence was not in on the joke. But the Post's columnist, Mr. Charles Gordon Greene, continued the gag by responding as if he were from the Anti-Bell Ringing Society. He wrote: "We said not a word about our deputation passing "through the city" of Providence.—We said our brethren were going to New York... and they did go... The "Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells," is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have his "contribution box," et ceteras, o.k. (all correct) —and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward."

Okay, ignoring Mr. Greenes' convoluted sentence structure for now, the corks were flying because (mythical) champagne bottles had been opened by the (mythical) band of raucous anti-bell ringing acolytes, in their mythical celebration. And reading all this, the non-mythical readers of the Post were by now having a jolly good time at the expense of the rubes from Providence. And I suspect they were having such a good time that they failed to notice the momentous event which had just occurred - the birth of a new word.

Not the conception, certainly, which may have occurred orally a hundred years before, maybe a thousand years before. But this was the moment of birth, 23 March, 1839, the first appearance in print that has so far been uncovered of the word "Okay" or OK. The word was so new, is still so new even today, that its spelling has yet to be standardized. And it all happened because the humorists in Boston had become cannibalistic, consuming their own jokes.

But OK would probably have died aborning (or a-boring) had not it been saved two years later by the Presidential election of 1840, which pitted the incumbent Democrat Martin Van Buren (above) against the Wig, William Henry Harrison. 

You might think the joke here was that Harrison would win the election but die just a month after his interminable inaugural address. But it turns out the real joke was on the loser, which was Van Buren, who took only 7 states, to Harrison's 19. But that was OK, because Van Buren's political loss was a big win for lexicography.

You see, the Democrat's campaign manager, Amos Kendall, decided it would be a good idea to emphasize his man's ethnic roots. Van Buren, although elected from Pennsylvania,  had been born in the tiny New York village of Kinderhook (above),  a bastion of Dutch culture in a rising tide of English Episcopalian types,  making their man an ethnic minority. 

And believing this was just the image the American people were looking for in a politician, Kendall decided to give Van Buren the nickname of "Old Kinderhook", calling attention to both his age and his different-nesss.  And he tied it all together with that trendy new word from Boston.  They even had campaign buttons printed up reading simply "OK", as in "Old Kinderhook, and started OK clubs, urging supporters to say, "I'm voting for OK".

In response the Wigs insisted that OK actually stood for "Out of cash" or "Out of credit", revealing once again the endless wealth politicians can mine out of America's mountains of economic insecurity. One Wig columnist described O and K as " “frightful letters ". And when "Old Kinderhook" went down to defeat, that should have been the final end to the joke, and the new word.

Instead the fledgling word derivative received a new lease on life from a new technology, when the Morse telegraph was introduced in 1844 (above).  It took far less finger pressing to tap out the word "OK" (you could ignore the "o" and the "K" was just "dash - dot - dash") than to tap out the words "All is Correct".  OK was far easier to spell, too. In fact, OK is the strongest remaining artifact of telegraphy in our culture, the equivalent of a "Record Player" in the era of music downloads.

Twenty years later the young six foot five inch tall James Pyle opened a factory in Greenwich Village, where he relabeled sodium carbonate powder as "Pyle's OK Pearline Soap".  Mr. Pyle's genius was his discovery that the only difference between soaps was their advertising. All his advertisements framed traditional images of children and dogs and kitties, with that hip new word, OK, as a testament to purity of his product. He plastered Manhattan from the Battery to the Bronx with the word "OK" until the denizens were seeing it in their sleep. 

James made a literal fortune, and in 1914 his company was bought out by Proctor and Gamble, which renamed "OK Perline" as "Ivory Soap". - "99 and 44/100 % pure." As in 99% pure  sodium carbonate powder.  But by now the adolescent word was strong enough to stand on its own two letters.  Or four letters if you preferred. 

And in the mid-20th century,  as the telegraph was being pushed to extinction by the telephone, the lucky "OK" was given another boost on 5 May, 1961. Commander Alan B. Shepard (above), sitting atop a pencil thin Redstone rocket, assured his controllers that, "Everything is A-OK." 

And because the American space program performed in public, and the entire world was listening with rapt fascination, this anachronistic sliver of American English slang, a 130 year old inside joke amongst Boston sophists,  instantly became the first phrase of modern international slang.

People who do not fluently speak or even usually hear English in their daily lives, know and use OK. It is a borrowed word, which is a nice way of saying it may be the only English word for which the Shakespeare family does not collect royalties.

And that's the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Okay?

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